Voting Rights Election Denial

With Voting Already Underway, Trump's Justice Department Gave California 48 Hours to Stop Counting Ballots From People on a List It Won't Explain

Trump's Justice Department handed Los Angeles County a password-protected thumb drive of supposed noncitizen voters and demanded, with a 48-hour deadline, that California stop sending them mail ballots and set aside any ballots they've already returned. It didn't say how many people are on the list or how it decided they aren't citizens. Federal law bars most states from systematic purges this close to an election.

MAGA Report Cards · Oct 15, 2026

With Voting Already Underway, Trump's Justice Department Gave California 48 Hours to Stop Counting Ballots From People on a List It Won't Explain — Photo: Greg LaRose / Louisiana Illuminator, via States Newsroom

Voting for the November 3 election has already started in California. On Tuesday, October 13, Trump's Justice Department tried to decide who gets to finish.

In letters to California's Secretary of State and to the Los Angeles County registrar, the department gave the state 48 hours to review a list of voters it believes are likely noncitizens and hold back their ballots, States Newsroom reported. The deadline: noon Eastern on Thursday. If California didn't comply, the department said it would "seek emergency relief" in court.

The letters, signed by acting deputy attorney general R. Trent McCotter, told California that for anyone on the list whose citizenship it couldn't confirm, it should:

Stop sending mail ballots to anyone on the list who hasn't gotten one yet
Set aside — "segregate—not cancel" — any mail ballots they've already returned
Not count those ballots until their citizenship is "determined"

A thumb drive and a handwritten password

The list itself arrived in Los Angeles County — the most populous county in the country — on a thumb drive, with a handwritten note containing a password. Registrar Dean Logan said his staff didn't open it, because doing so would have broken the office's data security rules.

The letters didn't say how many people are on the list. They didn't say how the federal government decided those people aren't citizens.

"Any action to remove a voter from eligibility must be based on verifiable information, not assertions of unconfirmed data matching," Logan said. California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said the demands "only serve to cause chaos and fuel public distrust in our elections."

What the law says

Federal law prohibits most states from systematically purging voters in the 90 days before a federal election. Election Day is less than three weeks away. If the department sues, States Newsroom reports, a judge would likely have to decide whether a list like this one — undisclosed voters, matched by an unexplained method, handed over on a thumb drive — is the kind of mass removal the law forbids this close to an election.

And the department has been losing these fights. Federal courts have uniformly blocked its efforts to force states to hand over their voter rolls, including driver's license and Social Security numbers. A federal judge ruled last week against the department's use of voter data even from states that gave it up voluntarily. And the U.S. Supreme Court blocked Trump's attempt to restrict voting by mail through the Postal Service.

A problem that barely exists

Noncitizen voting is rare, and audits keep showing it. When Greg Abbott claimed Texas had caught 6,500 noncitizens on its rolls, his own office had confirmed 581. Earlier this year the same Justice Department warned election officials in at least 14 states that they could be prosecuted over noncitizen voters, which experts called intimidation.

This is also the claim House Republicans have been using to chase Trump's fraud stories. Bryan Steil, who runs the House committee that oversees elections, demanded classified briefings on Trump's claim that 250,000 noncitizens are registered — a figure a leading election expert called "completely noncredible."

Trump has long attacked California's elections, especially how long the state takes to count. That long count is a well-known feature of how California runs elections, with officials getting about a month to process every ballot. It isn't evidence of fraud.

What it adds up to

On October 13, with voting already underway, Trump's Justice Department gave California 48 hours to review a list of an undisclosed number of supposed noncitizens, stop mailing them ballots, and set aside ballots they had already returned. It delivered the list on a password-protected thumb drive without saying who is on it or how they were identified, though federal law bars most states from systematic purges within 90 days of an election. Federal courts have so far blocked every attempt by the department to force states to turn over their voter rolls.

Update, October 18, 2026: the department sued, and the list shrank by 170,000

California's state and local election officials refused to act on the list. When the 48-hour deadline passed on Thursday, October 15, the Justice Department immediately sued, States Newsroom reported — less than three weeks before Election Day, with voting underway.

We now know how many people are on the list: about 20,000, many of them in the Los Angeles area. That is about 0.08% of California's nearly 23.2 million registered voters. Over the summer, the federal government had claimed California had upwards of 190,000 noncitizens on its rolls. Homeland Security says 190,000 is still the number of "potential" noncitizen voters, and that the 20,000 are the ones it has checked by hand so far.

The lawsuit gives only a rough outline of how the list was made. It says ICE compares "information about voter rolls" with "its internal data," then uses investigative steps it doesn't describe to rate each match low, medium or high confidence. Homeland Security says it also uses commercial data sources.

The suit may also run into a court order. On October 9, U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan ruled against the department's year-long effort to collect states' full voter rolls and share them with Homeland Security to hunt for noncitizens. Common Cause and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which represent voters in that case, have asked her to hold a hearing on whether the California letters and lawsuit "appear to implicate — and perhaps outright violate" her order. She ordered the department to respond by Monday. A department lawyer argued in an email that the order "does not extend to using other methods."

The department has now lost 23 lawsuits seeking states' voter data, including one against California, States Newsroom reported. California Attorney General Rob Bonta: "Every count, recount, hand count, lawsuit, and audit has found that there's no widespread voter fraud in the U.S."